Ten years of civil war killed as many as two million people and left Mexico City occupied by armies that didn't want the job of running it. What defined the modern nation's identity came after, on the walls.
The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 against Porfirio Díaz and, after his exile, spiraled into a decade of war between the revolutionary factions who'd beaten him. President Francisco Madero was overthrown and murdered in a 1913 coup; Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata occupied Mexico City in December 1914 but neither wanted to govern it; and by the time Venustiano Carranza's faction won out and a new constitution was signed in 1917, an estimated one to two million people had died. Real stability didn't arrive until Álvaro Obregón's presidency starting in 1920. What built Mexico City's modern identity came after the fighting stopped: a government-funded muralism movement, led by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, that covered the capital's public buildings with murals depicting the revolution's ideals.
On December 6, 1914, roughly fifty thousand armed men marched down Paseo de la Reforma and into the Zócalo, led by two generals who’d just won a revolution and had no idea what to do with it. Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata made their way into the National Palace, where a photographer named Agustín Casasola caught the moment that still defines the whole decade: Villa sitting in the presidential chair, grinning, with Zapata seated stiffly beside him and other generals flanking them on both sides. Villa had insisted they take turns in the seat. Zapata refused it outright. “I didn’t fight for that,” he reportedly said.
Neither of them ended up running the country, and that was the problem in miniature. Francisco Madero, who’d forced Porfirio Díaz out in 1911, was overthrown and murdered less than two years later, in February 1913, after ten days of fighting in the capital known as the Decena Trágica: federal troops loyal to Madero traded fire with rebel forces holed up at La Ciudadela, near what’s now Avenida Balderas, until the general meant to defend the president switched sides instead. Madero was shot four days later. His death united the country’s revolutionary factions against the man who’d betrayed him, Victoriano Huerta, and by the following year they’d driven Huerta out. Then they turned on each other, which is how Villa and Zapata ended up standing in a palace they didn’t want.
The infighting ran for years past that photograph. Venustiano Carranza’s faction, backed by the general Álvaro Obregón, eventually broke Villa’s army at the Battle of Celaya in 1915, and Carranza’s government signed a new constitution on February 5, 1917 — the same constitution, amended many times over, that still governs Mexico today. Carranza was assassinated in 1920, and it was only under Obregón, president that same year, that the fighting genuinely stopped. Historians’ estimates for the total dead across the decade run from roughly one million to two million, counting combat, executions, and the famine and disease that followed the destruction of farmland and rail lines. Mexico City spent most of those years occupied by one army or another, never quite sure which one would hold the palace next.
What gave the new nation a coherent identity came after the shooting stopped. In 1921, the writer and philosopher José Vasconcelos, running the newly created Secretary of Public Education, decided that a country where most people couldn’t read needed its history told on walls instead of in books. He commissioned young painters to cover public buildings with murals depicting Mexican history and the revolution’s own ideals, starting at the National Preparatory School. Three of them, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, became known as los tres grandes and spent the following decade turning the capital’s government buildings into the era’s real monument.
Rivera was a committed Marxist in his own right, and in 1932 the Rockefeller family commissioned him to paint a mural for the lobby of its new RCA Building in Manhattan, on the theme of industry and humanity’s choice about its own future. Rivera used the wall to make his own argument instead, contrasting the rot he saw in capitalism with the promise of socialist revolution, and painted an actual portrait of Vladimir Lenin into a scene of workers marching toward it. When a New York newspaper called the mural communist propaganda and Nelson Rockefeller’s staff asked him to paint Lenin out, Rivera refused. “If you want communism, I will paint communism,” he told them, meaning he wouldn’t sanitize his own convictions to save the commission, not that anyone had requested it. He offered one concession, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the mural’s opposite side, and even that wasn’t enough. Rockefeller had the unfinished mural covered in 1933 and chiseled off the wall entirely in February 1934. Rivera, working from his own photographs of the original, repainted the whole composition that same year on a wall at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, retitled Man, Controller of the Universe. It’s still there.
The men in that 1914 photograph spent years fighting over who would occupy the chair inside the palace. The country that came out the other side ended up defined by what got painted on the walls around it.
Sources: Historical accounts and photography of the December 1914 Villa-Zapata occupation of Mexico City, including Agustín Casasola’s photograph; accounts of the Decena Trágica and Madero’s assassination; the text of the 1917 Constitution; historical accounts of José Vasconcelos’s muralism program and Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural.
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